Field of the Invention
The subject matter herein relates to management of solid state devices and, more specifically, to a technique for using file system indirection to directly manage the devices.
Background Information
To improve the performance and longevity of solid state devices (SSDs), such as flash devices, of a storage array, a flash translation layer (FTL) driver of a storage system (i.e., Peripheral Component Interconnect Express (PCIe) flash) may be utilized to perform one or more functions, such as wear leveling, garbage collection, and write amplification. To perform such functions, the FTL driver may relocate data from an original SSD storage block on the array to a new SSD storage block. As data is relocated on the SSDs, the FTL driver typically updates a FTL data structure, such as a FTL mapping table, maintained in memory of the storage system to keep track of the relocation of the data. The FTL mapping table typically translates a logical address associated with the data (e.g., as provided by an indirection data structure managed by a file system of the storage system) to a physical address associated with the SSDs (e.g., as provided by the FTL driver). However, updating and maintaining multiple data structures, including the mapping table, in memory with logical and physical addresses is costly in terms of computer resources (e.g., consumption of memory and translation processing).